For Want of a Life
by anthrop
Summary: The stranger stops, facing him directly. His expression is calculating, clinical. "So tell me, Vlad Masters, just what manner of creature are you?"


_A/N: Written for the SuperPhantom Week challenge over on Tumblr. Day 1's prompt was 'Past,' so I figured a little Vlad and Crowley back in the 80s/90s would work just fine. I listened to a lot of Tom Waits' _Blood Money_ for this, so the title comes from "Misery is the River of the_ World."_ Like my other SuperPhantom stories, this will **not** be continued, so please don't ask!_

* * *

Midnight, Wisconsin. The entire countryside has been churned to a rank, sucking mud after nearly a week of rain. Somewhere frogs croak, somewhere crickets sing. Beneath the waxing moon there is a crossroads, unpaved and unlit and miles away from anything, and kneeling in the exact center of that crossroads there is a man.

The man is in his twenties, though he no longer looks it. His stringy hair is long and white, his body thinned by disease. His face is bandaged and taped, and his breath is oddly strangled, misting in irregular bursts. It's an unseasonably cold night, but despite wearing only filthy hospital scrubs and a pair of ruined slippers the man doesn't shiver. From the hole he has dug with his mud-black hands he pulls out an old tin lunchbox, and he holds it aloft, imagining a greater weight to its shape. The weight of purpose, or destiny. Big words for big sacrifices.

He has never done this before. He doesn't even know for certain if this will work. But the man is out of options, and the man is all alone, and so he must resort to magic.

The man's name is Vlad Masters, and tonight he is going to summon a demon.

He opens the lunchbox, wincing at the gritty squeak of its rusted hinges. Inside are four items: a handful of dirt, brittle cat bones, dried yarrow, and set atop these is a yellowed photograph of a woman. He doesn't know the woman. The woman isn't important. The woman has probably been dead for years. Indifferent, he tosses the photograph aside and replaces it with another, folded and unfolded and touched so often it has lost all its stiffness and gloss. This photograph is of a young man with thick black hair and bright blue eyes set in a rawboned, intelligent face. The young man was him, not even two years ago. He is unrecognizable to that young man now.

He closes the lunchbox and returns it to the hole. It is only here he pauses, just for a moment. Doubting, maybe. Nervous, yes. But he takes a long, shaky breath, then scoops handfuls of mud until the hole is filled. He staggers to his feet with a grimace, hating how his scrubs are heavy and coldly clinging with mud.

There's nothing left to do now but wait.

"Well, aren't _you_ a neat trick."

The voice comes from nowhere, breathing a wry, husky chuckle into his ear. He recoils, motes of sickly green light bursting like road flares in his palm, baking the mud on his arms instantly. "Show yourself!" he cries, staring wild-eyed out into the darkness. His voice is raspy, cracking on the vowels, but he isn't afraid of who-of _what_-might be out there in the dark. He is not the young man he used to be.

A scant few yards away the air sizzles, and where there was nothing there is suddenly someone. The stranger is a man his age, not nearly as tall nor thin, yet he cuts a knife-edge figure in the moonlit dark with his elegantly tailored suit and shorn hair. The stranger stands with his hands clasped before him, and set into his round face are not eyes, not human eyes, but red pits. Vlad cannot help but picture bloody cysts where eyes ought to be, or smoldering embers, or worse.

"Nice night for a deal," the stranger says wryly. His voice is roughened by an accent Vlad can't quite place. Perhaps it's the voice of whatever unlucky human he wears, or perhaps it is an affectation. Who knows? It doesn't matter.

"It worked?" Vlad says weakly, the lights in his hands fading to nothing. "It actually _worked?_"

The stranger shrugs indifferently, and when he blinks his eyes are human, dark and glinting in the moonlight. "I'm here, aren't I?"

Vlad knees shake, his hands shake, he shakes from head to toe. He isn't afraid, but he knows that there is a precipice he's standing on, and that the fall from it is a long one. There are no safety nets at the bottom. But there aren't any options left. "You can help me?" he asks. "You'll do anything?"

"For a price," the stranger replies.

Vlad's bandages are still crisp, changed only shortly before he snuck out of his hospital room, and they crinkle when he grins. Something a bit too dusty to be called laughter stutters between his teeth. "Of course. I'd expect nothing less."

The stranger walks closer, leaving neither imprints in the mud nor dirtying his polished shoes. He speaks, circling Vlad. "So, my little curiosity, what is it you desire? What could leave you so _utterly_ desperate that you would resort to dealing with demons?" The stranger chuckles. It isn't a kind sound. "Must be pretty gruesome under all those wrappings, isn't it? I could smell the rot in you on my way upstairs."

It takes all of his willpower not to flinch. "There was an accident. I... I want the damage undone."

"You're going to waste your one-time miracle on cleaning up a few zits?" He _tsks_. "A waste if you ask me. Plenty of uglier men have hid behind the curtains and done well enough for themselves."

"I'm _dying_," Vlad snarls.

The stranger pauses in his circling, mouth quirked. "Now that's a different story, isn't it, eh Vladdie?"

"H-how do you know my name?"

"_Please_. Give me a _little_ credit, would you? What's the sense of making the trip topside to make a deal without doing a background check first?" The stranger resumes his circling. "Look at you: the first human lucky enough to not only catch a glimpse of the Other Side, but to take a piece of it back with him. This puts us in a bit of sticky situation though, doesn't it?"

Vlad's heart skips, but it's done that plenty of times since the accident. He ignores it. "Why's that?"

"Well if you've managed to get this far I'm going to assume you're intelligent enough to have done your homework. A crossroads deal is made between a demon and a human. _Full_ humans, mind you. Half-breeds, you see, have this nasty habit of turning feral, and you can't be sure they won't end up in Purgatory until it's too late to renege." The stranger stops, facing him directly. His expression is calculating, clinical. "So tell me, Vlad Masters, just what manner of creature are _you?"_

"Something new," Vlad replies immediately. There's no name for what he is. There's never been anyone like him in the whole of history, and even though it's killing him he can't help but feel something like pride for this. "Something worth breaking the rules for."

The stranger's eyebrows rise nearly to his hairline. "Are you presuming to tell me how to do my job?"

"I wouldn't dare," Vlad says hastily, holding up his hands. But he grins, and he's for once thankful for the bandages that hide the width of it. "But aren't you curious? To see what I might be capable of? What I might be able to do for you in the future?"

"Who says I'll need you to do anything for me in the future?" But there's a softness to his quick retort, and the stranger looks at Vlad less like he's scum and more like something worth his time. He's curious, and that is very good for Vlad.

"Who says you won't?" This is a demon he's dealing with-_making_ a deal with-and therefore he must be careful. He mustn't reveal too much, nor can he reveal too little. Young as he is, inexperienced and sick as he is, he knows to show, not tell. To catch a fish, you must first catch its attention.

He vanishes.

The stranger laughs. "Not bad. Completely useless against demons, mind you, but still, not bad at all."

Vlad reappears. "There's more to me than that," he says, hating the petulant tone that creeps into his voice. "I'm stronger every day; there's no telling what I'll be capable of in a few years."

The stranger's eyes flash that awful, wet red again. "Even though it's killing you?"

"It isn't my powers doing that, it's _this_. " He gestures savagely at his face, at his bandages, at the infection eating him alive. The doctors have coined it _Ecto-Acne_, a cruelly light-hearted joke of a term. Death by ghost pimples. How absurd. How awful. He will _not_ go out as a joke. "Cure me, and my soul is yours."

The stranger is quiet for a moment. Deliberating. Weighing options, perhaps considering the worth of Vlad's soul. Whether a contract with a man who is perhaps not even human anymore is worth it. Then he sighs explosively, clapping his hands. Vlad cannot help but flinch and hates himself for it, but he hates the sly grin he is given even more.

"Consider me curious," the stranger says. "Curious enough to take a risk. Ten years."

"Perfect," Vlad replies instantly. He would have agreed to one.

"_Ten years,_" the stranger repeats with an air of finality. "You'll get ten years with a clean face and then I come to collect."

"I understand." Vlad holds out his hand, to shake on it, to sign, to have blood drawn from his fingertips or a brand burnt into his forearm. He doesn't know, he doesn't care. He's just _ready_.

But the stranger wags his finger again, smirking. "Sorry love, shaking won't cover it with me. We'll need to get a bit more intimate than that."

Vlad balks. "You're _joking_."

"What, scared I've got something catching? You're the one with the putrid face."

"It just seems a bit... _uninspired_, doesn't it?"

Impatience curls the stranger's lip. "Do you want to seal the deal or not? I don't have all night."

Of course he does. He nods. "But first, give me your name."

The stranger's eyebrows rise again. "Impetuous little thing, aren't you? That's not part of the deal."

"Consider me curious." Perhaps throwing the words of a demon in its face is a bad idea, but there's no fun in playing meek when lightning sparks between your fingertips.

"Very well then." The stranger's teeth are very white as he dips mockingly at the waist. "Crowley, King of the Crossroads, at your _humble_ service."

A false name, obviously. The title might be too. But it's a start. It's something he can work with. It's more than he expected to get. Vlad bares his teeth, bowing in return. "It is truly an _honor_, Your Highness."

Crowley lets out a sharp bark of laughter. "Gutsy! _Good_. You'll need that down in the Pit. Now then, Vlad Masters-" He is suddenly inches away, eyes red as blood, as fire, as something so much worse only _glimpsed_. "You'll want to pucker up."


End file.
